Proper nouns and capital letters
A guide to using proper nouns and capital letters effectively
Proper nouns are specific, exclusive, unique name given to any person, place, animal, or thing. This is a name that a thing or a person identifies with and that distinguishes it from something or someone else.
Examples of proper nouns are:
Ayobami, Temitope, Oluwole, Olumide, Halima etc. —persons
Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, New York etc.—cities
Nigeria, The United Kingdom, Togo, Ghana etc.—countries
Benue River, Congo River, Aso Rock, Gangirwal etc—rivers and mountains
What this means is that we see proper nouns as names that are not always shared by other nominal entities. It’s like the ID or DNA of that thing or person or place or event.
Proper nouns MUST always begin with a capital letter, regardless of where they occur in a sentence.
In almost all cases, they are registered names, copyrighted titles of books, poems or movies (such as Dazzling Mirage, Ayinla, In Dependence, Last Days at Forcados High School, Telephone Conversation), trademarks (such as BMW, Coca-Cola, 7Up, YSL, MTN, Apple), official or recognized titles (such as Baale, Eze, Igwe, Professor, etc), names of organizations (such as Cowrywise, TBOSE Tutorial etc), labels, and inventions.
Days of the week (such as Tuesday, Monday, Friday etc) are proper nouns. Months of the year (such as May, December etc) are also proper nouns.
Festivals such as Argungu Fishing Festival, Ofala Festival, New Yam Festival, etc are proper nouns.
Names of newspapers or television channels like The Nigerian Tribune, Daily Times, The Nation Newspaper, CNN, BBC, Channels TV, AIT, Orisun, etc are also proper nouns.
The list is endless. However, if we understand the definition of proper nouns in the first paragraph, we can begin to identify other examples of proper nouns, of names that are unique, specific and exclusive to nominal entities, and of names that are not commonly shared.
It is important to note that proper nouns can be formed and hence they should be capitalized. We have seen over the years how some people or things bear or wear names such as Uncle, Big Head, Haunted House, Mom etc. We must be able to draw the line between what is used as a proper noun and what is common to all.
For example:
I’m going to tell Mom (as a proper noun) what Ayo did yesterday.
When will his mom (as a common noun) return from work?
Our moms are preparing for the wedding ceremony.
Generally, proper nouns do not take indefinite articles “a” and “an.
But occasionally, a proper noun is used as a common noun. That is, we take the name of one specific thing, and use it to refer to a class of things, usually to say "other things of this sort". For example, I can use Earth as a class of planet and earth as dirt. You gerrit?
Another example would be if you were discussing names rather than as references to specific people. Like, "I work with Victor." I'm using Victor to identify the person, it’s a proper name. But, "You can see our diverse national background just by looking at the names of the people who work here: we have a Peter, a Cynthia, a Moses, and a Tolulope." Even though these names are normally proper nouns, here I'm using them as common nouns.
It's interesting to note that using an indefinite article and a name (e.g. "an Albert Einstein") can either be used to mean "a person who has the given name, but has no relation to a famous person with that name" or "a person who is similar to a notable person with the given name, but whose actual name may be something else".
– supercat
Finally, a long string of words that are used as proper nouns are capitalized only in their content words. For example, University of Ibadan, Communication and Language Arts, In Search of Stolen Treasures etc.
Till I write to you again. Please drink a lot of water and mind your own business.Yours in English,
Francis